Kernel-2.6.7-1.494 and Nvidia Drivers

[Stan Bubrouski]

On Sun, 2004-07-25 at 03:45 -0400, Brian R Smith wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Regarding Kernel-2.6.7-1.494 and Nvidia Drivers,
> 
> I don't know if this has been mentioned before, but I've noticed some
> nasty problems with this kernel release (the rpm) and the Nvidia drivers
> while running Quake3 based games.  
> 

Then consult nVidia?  What version of the drivers are you using?
I'm currently using NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-6106-pkg1.run with 2.6.7-1.476
without issue.

> First of all, performance is terrible.  I could barely get Return to
> Castle Wolfenstein to run acceptably at 800x600x32 despite the fact that
> normally, it runs flawlessly on my Geforce2go at 1024x768x32 under
> normal circumstances.  Secondly, it seems that some of the hardware
> lighting instructions break under this kernel.
> 

This seems like it would be a driver problem...

> After fooling around with some things to try to fix this problem, I
> noticed that the kacpid process crashes for some reason, causing it to
> race and use >50% cpu.
> 

Then wouldn't one assume ACPI might be the prob?  There have been
numerous ACPI in the 2.6.8rcX kernels so this will prolly go away with
the next kernel RPM release...

> I did some looking around and noticed that some people have had issues
> with the PREEMPT_VOLUNTARY patch that was applied to this kernel and had
> a hunch that perhaps this patch was in some way screwing up the ACPI

How about ACPI is screwing up because of ACPI bugs?  Preemt Voluntary
has some issues here, but none are related to video and none are fatal.
Seems to work GREAT 90% of the time.

> subsystem in the kernel.  Rather than follow the same old mantra of
> adding an acpi=off line to grub (especially since this machine is a
> laptop), I rebuilt the kernel _without_ PREEMPT_VOLUNTARY and with

Are you sure your laptop's ACPI implementation is sane?  Speaking of
which you don't mention the laptop brand or hardware at all...

> PREEMPT and voila, the problems disappeared.  kacpid stopped crashing
> and 3d under q3 based games worked wonderfully with no apparent
> performance hit to my setup.
> 

There is a newer preempt voluntary in later 2.6.8rcX kernels which fix
many issues according to Igno, so...whatever just stick to preempt I
guess the whole point of preempt voluntary is to improve desktop
performance...

> I hope that if anyone else runs across this problem that this will help
> them and that perhaps it could help lead to a bug fix for this.
> 

It's probably already been fixed.

> 
> -brian
> 
> 

-sb
-- 
Stan Bubrouski <stan at ccs.neu.edu>